Study: Migrants Support Strong Leader In Power By Force If Necessary

Sean Gallup/Getty17 Aug 2016

A new study in Germany among migrants has shown that a majority want a strongman leader and have no problem with that leader getting power by force.

A new study of recent migrants by the School of Media, Communication and Economics (HMKW) claims that migrants have, for the most part, very conservative values and are quite comfortable with the idea of a strong leader, something common in the Middle East and North Africa. The migrants also were not too keen about sexual freedom in society and an overwhelming majority perhaps unsurprisingly thought well of German Chancellor Angela Merkel Die Weltreports.

The study, which took place over two months saw researchers survey 445 migrants in Berlin asylum homes and question them on the topics of democracy and integration. The support for democracy among the migrants was strong, and even stronger among university graduates where some 95 percent agreed that democracy was the most preferable form of government.

While researchers found the migrants attitudes positive toward the idea of democracy they found out that many migrants had little idea what democracy entailed in practise. According to professor Ronald Freytag who headed the study, the migrants had, “serious political understanding deficits,” and their notion of democratic values were “contradictory” and “underdeveloped.”

More troubling were the results that found that 64 percent of the migrants wished for a more authoritarian style of government and a strong ruler at the helm of the state. According to Freytag these types of questions about strong rules are often used to garner extreme right wing sympathies, but said in the case of supporters of the anti-mass migration Alternative for Germany (AfD) only a small minority supported a strongman ruler.

The migrants interviewed were mostly pro-womens rights when it came to legal equality but were, according to Freytag “prudish” on matters of sexuality. “Some social and societal values reminiscent of the German society of the 50s,” he said noting that close to half, or 48 percent, of the migrants viewed sex before marriage as a sin that must be punished. In some Islamic countries the punishment for sex out of marriage or for committing adultery can be death. The attitude was equal among young migrants under 25 and even among the highly educated.

70 percent of the migrants claimed they wished to stay in Germany and not go back to their home countries. They were asked who they would like to live near and the majority were fine with living next to Germans, but only those who had children and were heterosexual. 43 percent of the migrants said they would refuse to live next to gay Germans and 14 percent would not live next to a Jewish family.

Anti-homosexual attitudes and anti-Jewish ones among migrants are all too common. The rise of antisemitism has gone hand in hand with mass migration from Islamic countries with many Jews in places like France fleeing to Israel for their own safety. In European asylum homes homosexuals are often threatened and abused by fellow migrants to the extent that some have called for separate accommodation for them.